A couple of months ago I read a blog post by RJ Andrews, in which he described the process of making a map of California using a typewriter. It’s a beautiful map - made using over 2,500 keystrokes, all done by hand. The density of ink for each l...

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself fine-tuning the structure of my R scripts for #TidyTuesday, and each week they have similar sections: load packages, load data, data wrangling, make a plot, save the plot, and so on. What I’ve en...

When I’ve created data visualisations with {ggplot2} recently, I’ve been adding icons with my social media details in the caption. It’s a great, concise way to put your name on your work, and make it easy for people to find your profi...

Learning a new programming language can be tricky, and it can sometimes lead to more ways of getting confused - even in languages you know well! I always mix up len() and length()… When returning to Python after primarily working in R for a whil...

Back in April 2022, I participated in the #30DayChartChallenge and for the Storytelling prompt on day 29 in the Uncertainty category, I created the Goldilocks Decision Tree. I also gave a talk to R-Ladies Nairobi on the challenge and used the flowch...

You can’t make an R plot without breaking eggs… that’s how the saying goes, right? A recent #TidyTuesday data set explored US egg production and, thanks to an excellent suggestion from Tanya Shapiro to create a plot in the style of...

Time series data often contains information that’s not easily seen when simply visualising the data. We can uncover these hidden features using time series analysis, and use them to classify time series that exhibit similar features. Data ...

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that allows you to combine text with code to create fully reproducible documents in a variety of formats. One of those formats is PDF. The default outputs look reasonably good for academic articles, but if you’re making professional reports, a ...

Back in September 2022 I submitted {PrettyCols}, an R package containing aesthetically pleasing colour palettes, to CRAN. If you missed it, you can read the blog post introducing the package! After a few months, it was time for an update and this blog post will give you a brief overview of ...

Shiny is an R package that makes it easier to build interactive web apps straight from R. Back in July 2022 at rstudio::conf(2022), Posit (formerly RStudio) announced the release of Shiny for Python. As someone who knows Python but hasn’t writt...

The R versus Python debate has been going on for as long as both languages have existed. I’m not one to takes sides - I think you need to use the best tool for the job. Sometimes R will be better. Sometimes Python will be better. But what happens...

Throughout November I took part in the #30DayMapChallenge - a daily mapping, cartography, and data visualization challenge aimed at the spatial community. You can read my recap of the challenge in the blog I wrote last week, if you’re intereste...

Around the beginning of December social media accounts start to fill with images of people’s Spotify Wrapped showing their most listened to songs. If you’re an #RStats user, you might also be interested in which functions you use most often...

The #30DayMapChallenge is a daily mapping, cartography, and data visualization challenge aimed at the spatial community. Every day in November participants create a map with a given theme (e.g. red, movement, two colours) and share their results on soc...

Let’s say you need to understand how your data changes within a day, and between different days. For example, if you have hourly pollution data that follows a regular pattern throughout a day, but follows different patterns on a Wednesday and Sat...

A little while ago I saw this blog post by Craig Hamilton shared on Twitter. In it, he describes the process of building a Shiny app to search through his favourited tweets, after noting the difficulty of searching through tweets he had liked to find ...

Making plots that are aesthetically pleasing has always been an important aspect of data visualisation to me. And when I later started creating generative art, I would spend time choosing colours purely based on whether they looked good together. On w...

I’ve been contributing to #TidyTuesday challenges for about two years now, and my aim has always just been to play with new things in R. (For those of you unfamiliar with #TidyTuesday, it’s a weekly data project aimed at helping people develop their data wrangling and visualisation skills.) ...